How to Edit with AI on Instagram

Transforming your Instagram content from just okay to truly outstanding is now faster and easier than ever, thanks to AI. Whether you want to clean up your photos, add dynamic video subtitles, or write compelling captions, AI editing tools can seriously upgrade your entire workflow. This guide breaks down exactly how to use AI for editing on Instagram, from native features to third-party apps that can save you hours of work.

What Exactly Is AI Editing on Instagram?

AI editing uses artificial intelligence to analyze your photos, videos, and text, then automate complex or tedious creative tasks. Instead of manually removing an object from a photo dot-by-dot, an AI tool understands the entire scene and can remove it in one click, seamlessly filling in the background. Instead of typing out video captions word-for-word, an AI can transcribe, style, and sync them to your video automatically. Think of it less as a robotic replacement for creativity and more as a super-powered assistant that handles the grunt work, freeing you up to focus on the bigger picture of your brand and content strategy.

Start with Instagram's Built-In AI Tools

Meta is slowly rolling out AI features directly into its apps. While they might not be as powerful as dedicated third-party tools just yet, they are fun, fast, and worth trying out. The main features you can use right now are found within Instagram Stories.

AI Background Editor for Stories

Ever wish you could change the background of a photo without a single bit of complicated editing? Instagram's AI background tool does exactly that. It's a fantastic way to give an old photo a fresh, new look or create a surreal, eye-catching Story that stops people from tapping past.

How to use it:

• Open Instagram Stories and select a photo from your camera roll.
• Once the photo is loaded, look for a button at the top of the screen that looks like a person with a rectangular box behind them. It’s located next to the text and sticker icons.
• Tap it, and Instagram's AI will automatically cut you (or the main subject) out from the background.
• Now, you can type in a prompt to create a new background. You could try something like "on a magical glowing mushroom" or "against a neon city skyline at night."
• Instagram will generate a few options for you to choose from. Tap one to set it as your new background.

AI-Powered Custom Stickers

You can now generate custom stickers from a text prompt to add a unique, personal touch to your Reels and Stories. This is great for when you can’t find the perfect sticker or GIF in the existing library to match your content's specific vibe.

How to use it:

• In an Instagram Story or Reel, tap the Sticker icon.
• You should see an option called "AI STICKERS." Tap "CREATE."
• Type in a descriptive prompt for the sticker you want, like "a happy puppy wearing sunglasses" or "a slice of pizza skateboarding."
• The AI will generate sticker options based on your prompt. Select your favorite, and you can place it anywhere on your content just like a regular sticker.

Level Up Your Visuals with Third-Party AI Editing Apps

While Instagram's native tools are great for quick edits, dedicated third-party apps offer a whole different level of power and control. These tools can dramatically improve the quality of your visuals and save you an incredible amount of time.

Effortlessly Remove Objects and People

We’ve all had that perfect shot ruined by a stray coffee cup, a photobombing tourist, or an ugly power line in the background. Before AI, fixing this required expert-level Photoshop skills. Now, it takes a few taps.

Apps like Lightricks' Photoleap, Pixelcut, and Canva's Magic Eraser use AI to let you simply highlight what you want to remove. The AI then intelligently "erases" the object and reconstructs the background behind it as if it was never there. It feels like magic and is a complete game-changer for creating clean, professional-looking photos for your feed.

Use Case: You have a beautiful product shot, but the reflection on the table shows your messy room. Use an AI object remover to erase the reflection seamlessly in under a minute.

Perfect Portraits with AI Enhancement

Taking a selfie or portrait in less-than-ideal lighting can lead to blurry results or unflattering shadows. AI photo enhancers automatically address these issues. Tools like Lensa AI and Remini specialize in portraits. They can upscale low-resolution images, sharpen facial features, remove grain, and even make subtle skin-smoothing adjustments without making the photo look artificial. This allows you to salvage content that might have otherwise been unusable and ensure your headshots or team photos always look polished.

Use Case: A follower sends you a slightly blurry user-generated photo featuring your product. You can run it through an AI enhancer to improve its quality before re-sharing it to your Stories.

Expand Your Photos with Generative Fill

One of the most mind-blowing AI advancements is "generative fill," also known as AI image expand or outpainting. This feature, popularized by Adobe Photoshop and now available in apps like Photoleap, lets you expand the canvas of your photo. The AI generates new content that perfectly matches the style, lighting, and texture of your original image.

This is extremely useful for social media, where aspect ratios matter. You can take a horizontal landscape photo and use generative fill to expand it into a vertical 9:16 format, perfect for a Reel or Story background, without cropping away any of the original scene.

Use Case: You have a great horizontal photo of your team but need a vertical version for a Story announcement. Use generative fill to add more sky above and ground below, flawlessly matching the original image.

Produce Incredible Reels with AI Video Editors

Video editing is notoriously time-consuming, but AI is completely changing the game for Reels and other short-form video content. These tools are designed to automate the most tedious parts of the process.

Automatically Generate Animated Subtitles

A huge percentage of users watch videos on social media with the sound off. Adding subtitles is no longer optional - it's essential for engagement and accessibility. Manually transcribing and timing captions word by word can take hours. An AI-powered app like Captions changes everything.

You simply upload your video, and the app uses AI to automatically transcribe your speech with remarkable accuracy. It then generates animated, word-by-word subtitles that you can easily customize with your brand's fonts and colors. What used to take an hour now takes five minutes.

Edit Your Video Just by Editing a Text Document

This might be the single biggest productivity hack for anyone who creates talking-head videos. Tools like Descript transcribe your video into a text document. To edit the video, you just edit the text. Need to remove a section where you went off on a tangent? Just highlight that paragraph and press delete - Descript will automatically make the cut in the video timeline. It even has an "overdub" feature to fix misspoken words and can remove filler words like "um" and "ah" in just one click.

This transforms video editing from a technical process into an intuitive, word-based one, making it accessible to anyone who can edit a document.

Write Better Instagram Captions, Much Faster

Staring at a blank caption box wondering what to write is a frustration every social media manager knows well. AI writing assistants like ChatGPT, Jasper, or Copy.ai can serve as your personal brainstorming partner, helping you never run out of ideas again.

The trick is to give the AI a high-quality prompt. Don't just say, "Write a caption for a beach photo." The more detail you provide, the better the result will be.

Anatomy of a Great AI Caption Prompt:

• Context: Describe the photo or video in detail. (e.g., "A sunset photo of me doing a yoga pose on a cliff by the ocean.")
• Tone: Specify the feeling you want to evoke. (e.g., "The tone should be peaceful, reflective, and slightly inspiring.")
• Goal: What do you want people to do after reading? (e.g., "The goal is to get followers to comment with their favorite way to de-stress.")
• Format/Elements: Ask for specific inclusions. (e.g., "Include a thoughtful question to drive engagement. Provide 3 different caption options. Suggest 5 relevant hashtags about mindfulness and nature.")

By providing this level of detail, you move the AI from a simple word generator to a true strategic partner that produces captions perfectly tailored to your brand voice and marketing goals.

Final Thoughts

AI is more than just a passing trend, it's a powerful and practical set of tools that can enhance your creativity, improve the quality of your content, and save you valuable time on Instagram. By integrating AI-powered photo, video, and text editors into your workflow, you can handle the tedious tasks more efficiently and spend your energy where it matters most: connecting with your audience and growing your brand.

Once you’ve used AI to create a batch of stunning, engaging Reels and photos, the last thing you want is for the scheduling process to slow you down. That's why we built Postbase. Since we created our platform for the modern era of social media, it's designed from the ground up to seamlessly handle short-form video formats, Stories, and all the content types you’re using today. After all, a modern content strategy deserves a modern management tool.